Over the last few weeks, the actress Veronika Hyks has been bringing us
extracts from Jaroslava Skleničková’s memoirs, “If I had been a boy,
I would have been shot…”. The book tells the moving story of how
Jaroslava was sent with the other women from her home village of Lidice to
the Ravensbrück concentration camp near Berlin, after the Nazis razed the
entire village to the ground in June 1942. The men of the village were shot
in cold blood, and nearly all the children were gassed in Poland, but
throughout their stay in Ravensbrück, the women had no idea of their fate.
As the end of the war drew close, Jaroslava, together with her mother and
sister, were marched out of the camp, together with hundreds of other
women. David Vaughan brings the story up to date.

Jaroslava Skleničková
For several days the women are made to march under guard and with nothing
but wooden clogs on their feet. They cover 40 kilometres a day. On the way
they encounter large groups of civilians, retreating as the eastern front
approaches. At one point they are attacked by an Allied plane that mistakes
them for a German convoy. One day, quite suddenly, all the guards
disappear, and the women realize that they free. But, from now on, they
must survive on their own, amid the chaos of the German retreat. Veronika
Hyks reads.